Three MIT grads this week are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their clever SCIgen program, which randomly generates computer science papers realistic enough to get accepted by sketchy technical conferences and publishers, with a brand new tool designed to poke even more fun at such outfits.

Just a bit late for April Fool’s Day, the new SCIpher program from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab alums enables users to hide messages inside randomly-generated calls for papers from phony conferences whose names are so ridiculous that they sound legit. An MIT spokesman says the new tool is really just a way for geeky friends to mess with each other.

For instance, pop the following text into the SCIpher decoder to find out my secret message:

The First Annual AVQYK Symposium on linear-time, vertical sharing economy

Dear list owner and all!

Many information theorists would agree that, had it not been for cloud-based models, the understanding of thin clients might never have occurred. To put this in perspective, consider the fact that famous information theorists mostly use hierarchical databases to solve this issue. Without a doubt, two properties make this approach perfect: the new framework of scholars locates superpages, and also the new framework of security experts allows perfect technology. Thus, IPv4 and e-commerce offer a viable alternative to the understanding of IPv4.

The objective of this conference is to supply a seminar for surmounting the significant obstacles in the development, exploration, and improvement of atomic algorithms and scalable archetypes. Without a doubt, original papers are released on omniscient virtualization, perfect user interface design, and cloud-based natural language processing. The subject of AVQYK is ' interfering flexible services and modular configurations for experts ', sharing the convergence of cloud-based information, mobile epistemologies, and IPv7 in proving perfect frameworks of parallel cryptography. Thus AVQYK provides innovative, half-baked, and forward-thinking submissions on arguing any event-driven methods to all aspects covering the motif of this conference.

We are giving you this call for papers, assuming that you will consider submitting abstracts to this special issue. As a guideline, only research communications will be considered (no works). By comparison, submissions of revisions, abstracts and abstracts are also taken.

While SCIpher is intended as just a bit of fun, SCIgen was a low-budget effort to point out serious flaws in the world of academic journal publishers and conferences, which pepper researchers with calls for papers and charge for content they often clearly don't read before accepting.

Jeremy Stribling MS ’05PhD ’09 (now at crypto company Keybase), Dan Aguayo ’01 MEng ’02 (now at Meraki) andMax Krohn PhD ’08 (now runs Keybase) back in 2005 developed SCIgen over the span of just a couple weeks. Despite their rush job, the program was good enough to produce seemingly real compsci papers that include graphs, figures and citations. MIT's press office describes it as being almost like a Mad Libs for academic papers, and notes that it stemmed from work by Krohn at online study guide SparkNotes. (I could swear half the press releases we receive are generated by SCIgen...)

The impact of SCIgen has been real. The IEEE wound up pulling its sponsorship from WMSCI and worked with Spring Publishing to remove nonsensical papers from their sites (you can read Springer's paper ON the papers here). And Springer recently released SciDetect, an open-source tool for spotting SCIgen papers.

“Our initial intention was simply to get back at these people who were spamming us and to maybe make people more cognizant of these practices,” says Stribling, in a statement. “We accomplished our goal way better than we expected to.”

Bob Brown is a news editor for Network World, blogs about network research, and works most closely with our staff's wireless/mobile reporters. Email me at bbrown@nww.com with story tips or comments on this post.